Nine billion, one hundred ninety-two million, six hundred thirty-one thousand, seven hundred seventy hertz is the frequency of a photon absorbed or emitted between two hyperfine ground states of a Caesium-133 atom. This is the metric used to define one second. This is how we quantify time.

I was driving on historic Route 66 by myself during construction recently. While waiting in the line of cars for our turn to go through, I was watching the seconds, the minutes tick by. As we drove achingly slow, my mind started to wander into times past when I drove this road with babies in my car, to the passing of time when they became toddlers with their babblings, then through the winds of ages past children with their curiosities, and finally teenagers with their inquiries. As I drove past the smells of diesel and asphalt watching the machines cover up the potholes before the winter comes creating more cracks, I realized now how often I held eternity in those seemingly simple seconds driving my children on this well-worn road.

Time and Eternity have been a hobby of meditation for millennia from philosophers to scientists to moms traveling on Route 66. We cannot hold it, manipulate it, store it, add to it. We can know what time it is to make plans with loved ones. We know when the time is due for deadlines and appointments. We can quantify it with a random Caesium-133 atom. Yet we experience it while living life driving from one thing to another and chasing deadlines and sitting by the bedside of someone dying.

And the seconds ceaselessly turn to years. The Sun beats on the Earth as she turns while the Moon plays hide and seek and all those moments turn into memory. And memories sneak upon us while we sit idly by waiting for the chaser car to take us through construction zones.

There’s a passage in C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters that bears meditation. He penned this:

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. (emphasis added)

If Lewis’s premise is to be believed, the unique singularity of the Present is where time touches Eternity, where we enter timelessness. Poetic though this may be, it is also deeply philosophical or even theological. A single second will turn into another second then into another and another… When life is drudgery, these seconds linger on for what seems like forever. But when a moment occurs that you want to last forever, they fly like a photon traveling at the speed of light. How did it go when Alice asked the White Rabbit how long forever lasts? Sometimes only for a second. Only for that moment of transition from one hyperfine ground state to another.

It is a crazy physics that governs this world. All those seconds that have already occurred are locked into the past only to become memories. But when those seconds occur, we have the opportunity to enter into eternity. Even now, this second. What a holy concept! Every moment we are on the threshold of eternity. What holy ground.

The chaser car left and the line of commuters late for that important meeting, moms taking kids to their next thing, families going on holiday, someone rushing to the hospital before it is too late, and me meandering to work used those seconds to speed up our cars to get down the road. Those seconds passed and new ones came. What a crazy thought. If a second in the present touches eternity, then would all the seconds we experience be living in eternity?

A book about Curious George lay on a table, I pick it up and hold my two squirmy grands and begin to read the antics of what this monkey who lives with the man in a yellow hat does. They listen mostly and play with the coasters nearby mostly. Eternity opened up in the love I feel for them and the hope I have for them and the grace I pray governs them. Eternity isn’t just experiencing the moment, but relishing in the relationship I have with these precious little lives.

Eternity isn’t time that can be measured by a Caesium-133 atom. Eternity is being present in the Present. Eternity is being fully present in the presence of I AM. Eternity is and always will be about relationships.

When Moses wondered in the desert with his father-in-law’s animals, he caught sight of a burning bush that didn’t burn. Any person would leave the animals and investigate further. Moses was told to remove his sandals for he was entering holy ground. When the present opens to His presence we are on holy ground. When Moses asked for His name, the reply was simple “I AM WHO I AM” and that was all Moses needed in that holy second.

When Jesus had a radical conversation with the Jews telling them that Abraham rejoiced to see the day Jesus came. The Jews were stuck in the 9,192,631,770 hertz and became incredulous that Jesus could never have met Abraham who died two millennia before Jesus was born. Jesus is not bound by our quantification of a second. Jesus boldly declared, “before Abraham was, I AM.” Jesus lived in the present in the presence of I AM. In those seconds, they picked up stones to silence the eternity before them. To leave the holy ground they stood on.

And I think on all the times I traveled that historic Route 66 in a panic, in a rush, in frustration, in confusion, or simply in mundane and missed the eternity that was there and threw rocks at the holy ground I sat in. And I know that I will in the future travel that road forgetting that the photon radiates to define my seconds and neglect the holy ground I am traveling through.

Yet I know that there will be moments that I will enter the holy ground and be present with the Presence of I AM.

My squirming grands toddled and crawled away leaving Curious George in a pickle to be solved later. I sat there in the glow of their warmth. My mind took me decades and miles away.

My little daughter grabbed my hand and led me from my study desk. My physics book open with unfinished homework that was due the next day. She held a book in one hand and mine in the other desiring me to sit in the reading chair. We read the first book, me thinking that I’d get back to my deadlines. She dropped it on the floor then got down and went to the homemade bookshelf that held her “study” books and brought the next one. We snuggled and read that one then dropped it on the floor.

An hour went by with her toddling over and bringing a new book to be dropped by the chair after we read the story and studied the pictures. The bookshelf was nearly emptied and the pile next to the reading chair was a small mountain. She fell asleep.

I looked at my study desk with its book open and problems that needed solved, equations that needed manipulated, and answers that needed justified. I held her close listening to the rhythmic breathing of a toddler safe and secure and fully filled with stories.

I closed my eyes. In that moment, that 9,192,631,770 hertz defining a second, I knew that I held eternity asleep in my arms.